Abstract: In this paper, the commercial communication network was adopted to carry out real-time online tracing and monitoring on the positions of pigs in the whole process in order to realize 3D pig positioning. After the positioning signals were analyzed quantitatively, the positioning algorithms that can automatically adapt to the surroundings were developed, including 5-base station adaptive positioning algorithm, 4-base station adaptive positioning algorithm and positioning algorithm based on communication radius constraint. The 5-base station adaptive positioning algorithm was tested using the basic data. It is shown that the maximum positioning error is not larger than 1.6 m, and the average error is 0.61 m. To carry out high-precision positioning with the minimum base stations, 4-base adaptive positioning algorithm was developed. Then, it was tested based on two sets of data. It is shown that its average positioning error is 2.19 m. Moreover, the constraint of different communication radius was investigated. It is indicated that the shorter the communication radius, the fewer the effective communication connections and the lower the positioning precision. In the range where the signals emitted from the pig can be received, the appropriate number of base stations is 5-13. This real-time 3D pig positioning algorithm based on wireless communication base station is tested in the actual pigging process of oil pipeline for pig positioning. It is verified that this method is effective.