In this paper, the performance of a dual-hop multiuser underlay cognitive network is thoroughly investigated by using decode-and-forward (DF) protocol at the relay node and employing opportunistic scheduling at the destination users. A practical scenario where co-channel interference (CCI) signals are present in the system is considered for the investigation. Considering that transmissions are performed over non-identical Rayleigh fading channels, first, the exact signal-to-interferenceplus-noise ratio (SINR) of the network is formulated. Then, the exact equivalent cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the outage probability of the system SINR are derived. An efficient tight approximation is proposed for the per hop CDFs, based on which, the closed-form expressions for the error probability and the ergodic capacity are derived. Furthermore, an asymptotic expression for the CDF of the instantaneous SINR is derived; and a simple and general asymptotic expression for the error probability is presented and discussed. Moreover, the adaptive power allocation under total transmit power constraint is studied in order to minimize the asymptotic average error probability. As expected, the results show that optimum power allocation improves the system performance compared with the uniform power allocation. Finally, the theoretical analysis is validated by presenting various numerical results and Monte Carlo simulations. Index Terms-Underlay cognitive radio, dual-hop decodeand-forward, co-channel interference, error probability, outage probability, ergodic capacity, optimization I. INTRODUCTION C OGNITIVE radio (CR) has become a more attractive research field in wireless communication for many researchers in the last few years [1]-[5]. This is because of its promise of using the existing frequency spectrum more efficiently. Recently, three paradigms have been proposed for realizing the CR network [2]. Based on the simplicity of implementation, they are underlay, interweave and overlay. In an underlay CR scheme, there is a strict power constraint on the transmission power [2] for the purpose of the protection of the quality of service (QoS) of the primary user. One of