The Internet of Things (IoT) is looming technology rapidly attracting many industries and drawing research attention. Although the scale of IoT-applications is very large, the capabilities of the IoT-devices are limited, especially in terms of energy. However, various research works have been done to alleviate these shortcomings, but the schemes introduced in the literature are complex and difficult to implement in practical scenarios. Therefore, considering the energy consumption of heterogeneous nodes in IoT eco-system, a simple energy-efficient routing technique is proposed. The proposed system has also employed an SDN controller that acts as a centralized manager to control and monitor network services, there by restricting the access of selfish nodes to the network. The proposed system constructs an analytical algorithm that provides reliable data transmission operations and controls energy consumption using a strategic mechanism where the path selection process is performed based on the remaining energy of adjacent nodes located in the direction of the destination node. The proposed energy-efficient data forwarding mechanism is compared with the existing AODV routing technique. The simulation result demonstrates that the protocol is superior to AODV in terms of packet delivery rate, throughput, and end-to-end delay
