In this paper, a scalable and real-time decision-based carrier tracking for software defined radio (SDR) for M-ary QAM modulation has been proposed and tested in real-time using the universal software radio peripheral (USRP)-2922. The proposed system provides real-time decision-based carrier tracking for improved efficiency and performance. The real-time transfer of data has been done using the USRP-2922 hardware using the M-ary QAM modulation scheme for data transmission. The novelty of the proposed system is that one can transfer random data (binary bits), text or an image which can be encoded using the desired forward error correction codes (FEC) namely the convolution coding/Viterbi soft decision decoding and the turbo coding/decoding. The proposed novel SDR transceiver system with real-time decision-based carrier tracking shows an improved performance for different parameters such as the bit error rate (BER) and signal to noise ratio (Eb/No).