At present, the pollution control mainly focuses on human prevention, supplemented by relevant regulations to limit the pollution behavior of the actors. Due to human initiative, the whole positioning cycle of manual monitoring technology takes a long time, and different water areas lead to different sampling times. In addition, the sampling process is also vulnerable to weather conditions, and the complexity of manual calculation is high. The method of applying wireless sensor network to water environment location can overcome the shortcomings of the above technologies on the premise of obtaining high precision location results. The rapid and accurate acquisition of water quality information and the efficient use of data are the key to the application of Internet of Things technology in water environment monitoring. This paper proposes an optimization design scheme of wireless sensor in water pollution source detection based on the Internet of Things, analyzes the data model of water pollution source detection, optimizes the model using wireless sensor technology, and finally conducts simulation test analysis. The simulation results show that the algorithm has a certain accuracy, which is 7.35% higher than the traditional algorithm. At present, it is in the industrialization transition period, and water pollution incidents occur frequently. If the pollution sources can be found in time, it is convenient to stop and control the pollution discharge in a timely manner. It is of great significance to protect water environment and ecology.