Given the scarcity of energy in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), innetwork data processing by distributed, cooperating services is often used to reduce the amount of information that has to be routed to the base station and thereby to reduce communication and energy consumption. However, to minimize the amount of communication between services and their requesters, the locations of services in the network have to be selected carefully. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient

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... pired heuristic for service assignment in WSNs. In order to reduce the amount of information exchange necessary for our heuristic, we use a concept observed in ant colonies that utilizes only local information. We model packets as ants (depositing pheromones at the visited nodes), services as food sources and requesters as formicaries. To optimize an objective function (reduction of communication distance between services and requesters), an explorer agent makes local service assignment decisions based on solely local information: the pheromones deposited by the ants. Furthermore, our paper presents the formal definition of the problem of service assignment and a thorough analysis and discussion of the results of our experiments, which show the efficiency of our approach.