Recent work shows sink mobility can improve the energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks.However,the speed limit of the mobile sink often lead to increasing data gathering delay,which may be unacceptable in some real-time applications with strict delay requirement.To address this issue,this paper proposes a path selection scheme based on virtual nodes' priority to meet the delay requirement and minimize the energy consumption of entire network.Simulation experiments under MATLAB shows that computational complexity performance and scalability performance of the proposed scheme can be increased effectively at the cost of little more energy consumption in comparison with some baseline algorithms.