A Mobile Sink-based Wireless Sensor Network comprises multiple sensor nodes strategically distributed across a monitoring area to collect data, along with a Mobile Sink, a device that traverses the area to gather the sensory data. A significant challenge in MS-WSN, especially in sparse networks, is the presence of energy holes in close proximity to the rendezvous points, the specific locations where the mobile sink gathers data. This article presents Distance-aware Clustering and Path Construction (DCPC) in Mobile Sink-based Wireless Sensor Networks, a novel technique that seeks to group the sensor nodes by dynamically limiting the cluster size according to the monitoring area and the distribution of the sensor nodes so as to distribute the load of data delivery equally between nodes. Ant colony optimization is subsequently employed to generate a trajectory for the mobile sink, and along this path, collection agents are selected to ensure efficient data delivery. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DCPC technique outperforms sparse networks and is ideal for scenarios where network lifetime and end-to-end latency are equally important.