Software-Defined Network (SDN) has a possible pathway to overcoming resource management complexities. The Energy-aware (EA) routing protocol has been adopted and functioned in many network applications. However, the chief problem in this protocol is high energy consumption and collision. So, to improve the performance of routing protocol in SDN, the current work has designed a novel Buffalo-based Energy-Aware Duty Cycle Routing (BEADCR) protocol to diminish energy usage. Here, buffalo fitness monitors the high energy-consuming nodes and removes them. Moreover, the data rate of each node was observed, and the zero data rate nodes were considered as rest nodes. In addition, to avoid a collision, the data overhead of each node was monitored, and the migration function was performed to share the high load with the rest nodes by activating the presented BEADCR model. This improves performance by gaining high monitoring accuracy, less energy consumption, high packet-delivery ratio (PDR), high throughput ratio, and high energy efficiency. Further, the result obtained is compared with other existing models to determine the effectiveness of the proposed model.