Cognitive radio (CR) plays an important and promising role in solving wireless spectrum scarcity problems by exploiting wireless spectrum bands that have been underutilised thus far. CR is a type of wireless communication in which wireless devices use environmental sensing to detect and change transmission parameters. The authors propose the probabilistic and deterministic path detection (PDPS) Protocol for CR networks in this study. PDPS aims to increase the probability of finding the path of best quality between any source and any destination. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated by conducting comprehensive simulation scenarios and experiments using a special simulator, which was built using Java. The simulation results highlight the benefits of the proposed path selection technique in comparison to state-of-the-art protocols. Comparisons are carried out using several performance metrics; namely throughput, stability and end-to-end delay.