Improving the performance of data gathering while saving the energy of network is one of the subjects of mobile data gathering protocols. In order to achieve the goal, the virtual force technique is introduced into the research where the data in the transmission queue and the distance between the sensor and the collector are simulated as forces. The collectors move on the direction of net force until the system reaches an equilibrium state. However, in the virtual force based data gathering system, the connectivity and communication quality have to be maintained for updating the changes of virtual forces. Otherwise, the loss of message will lead the system into a wrong equilibrium state and lower the performance of data gathering. In this paper, we formulate the moving process of data collectors as a Markov chain and determine the moving path using Markov decision process (MDP). The collectors move along the path defined by the optimized policy which is off-line computed and downloaded to collectors. Because the movement of collector no more relies on the online computed virtual force, the connectivity and communication quality of network have less effect on our MDP based protocol than the original virtual force based protocol. We compare the simulation results of our protocol, virtual force based protocol and the travel salesman problem (TSP) based protocol. The simulation results show that our protocol is resistant to connectivity error and works well when the communication error is applied to the system.