Aiming at the shortcomings of the existing RSS(received signal strength) based localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks (WSN), a cooperative localization algorithm (CLA) is proposed. A reference anchor node is introduced to tolerant some minor error including the node position error. Dixon detection method is applied to remove abnormal RSS values, while the standard deviation threshold of RSS and learning model are introduced to reduce the RSS ranging error and effectively improve the precision. Simulation experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results demonstrate that the localization accuracy is improved effectively, while the stability and robustness are better.