The present invention relates to a shortest path-based automatic positioning method of sensor network nodes on the sparse measurement set, and belongs to the technical field of automatic positioning of the wireless sensor network. The positioning method is characterized by orderly comprising node distribution, route establishment, data transmission, network connection information extraction, relative coordinate positioning of the node, absolute coordinate transformation, outward transmission of results by a computer, and so on; wherein, when the relative coordinates of the node are positioned relative to the adjacent node, a detection method of radio frequency is used for measuring the distance between the nodes; for the non-adjacent node, the distance of Freud shortest-path is used for estimating the distance between the nodes, thus the shortest-path distance matrix which comprises the adjacent node and the non-adjacent node is got; then a method of multi-dimensional scaling analysis can be adopted to acquire the initial value of topological estimation of the node position which is relatively positioned; the similar probability distribution of the unknown distance is calculated; the likelihood function of the complete-distance matrix is then used as an expected objective function for optimization, so as to eliminate the randomness, thus the relative positioning results can be acquired.