The proliferation of sensor technology in many areas have gained more attention on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) from both research community and actual user. However, energy consumption continues to be a constrained resource and remains a crucial issue of this technology. Since data transmission and communication in the network consumed a lot of energy in WSN, the activity of the sensor nodes should be altered to prolong the lifetime of the network. To this end, this paper provides the survey on how Software-Defined Networks (SDN) approach has been used to reduce the energy consumption in WSN. Software-defined network is developed with the purpose to facilitate the emergence of the centralized control of the network data-path in which resulted in compliance by decoupling the control and forwarding planes. With this paper, readers can be more understanding better of how software-defined network works and the effectiveness of using software-defined network in handling the shortcomings in WSN. © 2017 IEEE.