The reconfigurability in Cognitive Radio (CR) facilitates to dynamically change its parameters for the efficient spectrum utilization. The motivation behind the study of cognitive radio is that the number of different radio signals can be handled without using extra circuitry, i.e., reusing identical hardware with the change in the software will reduce time to market, development cost, and upgrade infrastructure. Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an enabling technology for Cognitive Radio (CR); therefore, it emphasizes on SDR unique features, characteristics, and basics concepts that are required to understand operation of SDR. SDR allows service providers to upgrade infrastructure without unreasonable cost. Modulation techniques play a vital role in any communication systems such as cable modems, DSL modems, CDMA, 4G, Wi-Fi, and WIMAX; thus, it emphasizes on implementation of modulation techniques using SDR Generic hardware, which is operated by Open Source software called GNU Radio. Implementation of various analog and digital modulation techniques using the GNU Radio provides a way for developing advanced wireless communication system. GNU Radio software is a highly flexible signal processing platform, which makes it easy and reduces time to implement different modulation techniques with appropriate script.