The invention provides a collaborative positioning method in a wireless sensor network. According to the positioning method, different node clusters are divided based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS) of each node to be positioned and Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) of an estimated position, a reference node beneficial to positioning accuracy is selected from the node clusters, and the position of the node to be positioned is calculated by utilizing the known position information of the selected reference node with a Linear further Squares (LLS) algorithm. By selecting the reference node for the node to be positioned with the collaborative positioning method, the energy consumption of the wireless sensor network and the calculating complexity of collaborative positioning are greatly reduced at the cost of slightly reducing the positioning accuracy.