For enhancing the coverage of wireless networks and increasing the spectrum efficiency, small cell networks (SCNs) are considered to be one of the most prospective schemes. Most of the existing literature on resource allocation among non-cooperative small cell base stations (SBSs) has widely drawn close attention and there are only a small number of the cooperative ideas in SCNs. Based on the motivation, we further investigate the cooperative approach, which is formulated as a coalition formation game with power control algorithm (CFG-PC). First, we formulate the downlink sub-channel resource allocation problem in an SCN as a coalition formation game. Pareto order and utilitarian order are applied to form coalitions respectively. Second, to achieve more availability and efficiency power assignment, we expand and solve the power control using particle swarm optimization (PSO). Finally, with our proposed algorithm, each SBS can cooperatively work and eventually converge to a stable SBS partition. As far as the transmit rate of per SBS and the system rate are concerned respectively, simulation results indicate that our proposed CFG-PC has a significant advantage, relative to a classical coalition formation algorithm and the non-cooperative case.