  We employ Permutation Trellis Code (PTC) based multi-level Frequency Shift
Keying signaling to mitigate the impact of Primary Users (PUs) on the
performance of Secondary Users (SUs) in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). The
PUs are assumed to be dynamic in that they appear intermittently and stay
active for an unknown duration. Our approach is based on the use of PTC
combined with multi-level FSK modulation so that an SU can improve its data
rate by increasing its transmission bandwidth while operating at low power and
not creating destructive interference for PUs. We evaluate system performance
by obtaining an approximation for the actual Bit Error Rate (BER) using
properties of the Viterbi decoder and carry out a thorough performance analysis
in terms of BER and throughput. The results show that the proposed coded system
achieves i) robustness by ensuring that SUs have stable throughput in the
presence of heavy PU interference and ii) improved resiliency of SU links to
interference in the presence of multiple dynamic PUs.
