Abstract: Mobile-sink shortest path planning problem can be regarded as a special case of TSPN problem, since the neighborhoods are the communication ranges of sensor nodes, which can be modeled as possibly overlapped disks. This problem is NP-Hard. To solve it, a novel glowworm swarm optimization based algorithm is proposed. At first, a search space reduction method is designed for compressing search space and improving efficiency of problem solving according to the nature of the problem. Then, a mutation operator for the outliers of the glowworms and an improved moving method are applied to improve the convergence speed and the quality of the result. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a better result than the related algorithms.