Nowadays, cognitive radio (CR) is a promising concept to improve the radio spectrum exploitation. CR has tremendous ability to enhance spectrum efficiency by allowing secondary users (SUs) to access licensed radio spectrum resource which is currently not being used by primary users (PUs). One basic challenge of that paradigm is securing the quality of service (QoS) of the primary link transmission while increasing the rate of the secondary links transmission. Cooperative relaying is an encouraging technology which offers the opportunity to maximize the transmission diversity gain significantly in the rapid development growth of wireless communication which contains cognitive radio networks. On the other hand, effective capacity (EC) which is designed to provide a maximum constant arrival rate that a statistical wireless channels can support while satisfying statistical QoS requirements. In this thesis, the performance enhancement analysis of cognitive radio relay network (CRRN) by exploiting the direct communication link has been investigated in Rayleigh fading channel where peak interference power constraint is taken into consider. A spectrum sharing technique is considered in this thesis where a restriction of spectrum sharing is applied by the PUs. Here, an SU can coexist simultaneously with the PU for transmitting data as long as a certain threshold on the peak interference power applied on the primary receiver is not overstepped by the SUs transmission. In addition, it is supposed that there are multiple intermediate relay nodes available to transmit their signal to the destination along with a direct communication link for secondary transmission. Moreover, the SU transmission has to meet a random delay QoS constraint. By providing this QoS constraint, the maximum arrival data rate of SUs can be achieved with small error of probability. Specifically, this thesis also acquires closed-form expressions of EC for CRRN. It is evident that if the channel quality and the interference threshold set by the PU are changed, then the capacity of the channel is also to be changed. In addition, it is also verified that the direct communication link together with multiple relay nodes has significantly higher capacity gains compare to non-direct communication link for CRRN. Matlab simulations are presented to find out theoretical results and Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to support these numerical results. Both the simulation results and the analytical results match very well.