Aiming at the problem of insufficient positioning accuracy of traditional DV _ Hop algorithm in wireless sensor networks, an improved DV _ Hop positioning algorithm based on ranging correction and badger optimization is proposed. Firstly, the minimum hops between nodes are refined by multi-communication radius; secondly, the minimum mean square deviation criterion and correction factor are used to reduce the jump error; finally, the improved badger algorithm with excellent global optimization performance is introduced to replace the least square method to calculate the unknown node coordinates, which further reduces the calculation error. The network simulation results show that under different conditions, the positioning error of the optimization algorithm decreases by 16.62 % and 3.92 % on average compared with the traditional DV_Hop algorithm and the improved algorithm (PDDV_Hop), which can effectively improve the positioning accuracy. The positioning accuracy of the optimization algorithm is less affected by the number of anchor nodes, which can reduce the deployment cost of anchor nodes on the premise of ensuring the positioning accuracy.