In this paper, a multi-hop transmission protocol based on parallel communication of secondary users (SUs) is proposed. The primary multi-hop network coexists with a set of SUs by cooperative spectrum sharing. The main optimization target of our protocol is the overall performance of the secondary system with the guarantee of the primary outage performance. The energy consumption of the primary system is reduced by the cooperation of SUs. The aim of the primary source is to communicate with the primary destination via a number of primary relays. SUs may serve as extra decode-and-forward relays for the primary network. When an SU acts as a relay for a primary user (PU), some other SUs that satisfy the condition for parallel communication are selected to simultaneously access the primary spectrum for secondary transmissions. For the proposed protocol, two opportunistic routing strategies are proposed, and a search algorithm to select the SUs for parallel communication is described. The throughput of the SUs and the PU is illustrated. Numerical results demonstrate that the average throughput of the SUs is greatly improved, and the end-to-end throughput of the PU is slightly increased in the proposed protocol when there are more than seven SUs.