Cognitive relay technology has been envisioned as a promising transmission scheme to enhance the reliability and coverage of secondary networks. However, the performance of cognitive relay networks (CRNs) is limited by the lack of accurate channel state information (CSI). As such, this paper adequately addresses the impact of imperfect CSI on the performance of cognitive multihop networks by proposing a simple yet effective backoff control power method. In addition, novel exact and asymptotic expressions for outage probability and ergodic capacity over Rayleigh fading channels are also derived. These tractable analytical results reveal new insight into the design, e.g., the number of hops for secondary network, and optimization of cognitive multihop networks.