The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought big challenges to the traditional cellular networks such as super dense devices and deep fading channels. These new challenges will lead to a significant transmission efficiency degradation and increase the device's power consumption, especially in the uplink. A huge pressure will be also imposed to the enhanced Node B's (eNB) scheduler due to the large number of users. In this paper, a semi- centralized controlled cooperative method is proposed for the uplink cellular transmission, where the User Equipment (UE) relay will be randomly selected according to a certain density decided by the eNB. Two specific cooperative schemes based on the Device-to- Device (D2D) are proposed, which are the random UE relay scheme and the one further combined with the Network Coding (NC). The theoretical analyses for both of them are given and corresponding closed-form results are derived. The D2D interference is considered and modelled based on the stochastic geometry. The performance gains are identified by numerical evaluations in various scenarios and the comparisons between two cooperative schemes are made as well. Also, these results can provide an important guideline for the eNB to determine the optimal density of the UE relays.