This paper presents a generalized formulation for analyzing stability and performance trade-offs inherent to multi-hop routing in mobile sink based sensor data collection systems. The paper parameterizes the extent of multi-hop routing as a hop-bound factor which is used for representing a wide spectrum of design options including single-hop with mobile sink, multi-hop with static sink, and different levels of mobile sink based multi-hop routing in between. A performance model is developed for studying the impacts of multi-hop routing on energy and collection delay performance. Also, a number of thresholds are derived from the model for determining the amount of multi-hop routing that can be used for stable and efficient data collection in the context of constantly moving sinks. The second part of the paper develops a distributed network-assisted framework for mobile sink trajectory planning and navigation without relying on geographical sensor and sink localizations. Finally, the system performance trends obtained from the model are validated using a packet level simulation of the network assisted navigation framework.