Many self-configuration problems that occur in sensor networks, such as 
clustering or operator placement for in-network data aggregation, can be 
modeled as facility location problems. Unfortunately, existing distributed 
facility location algorithms are hardly applicable to multi-hop sensor 
networks. Based on an existing centralized algorithm, we therefore devise 
equivalent distributed versions which, to our knowledge, represent the first 
distributed approximations of the facility location problem that can be 
practicably implemented in multi-hop sensor networks with local communication. 
Through simulation studies, we demonstrate that, for typical instances derived 
from sensor-network configuration problems, the algorithms terminate in only 
few communication rounds, the runtime does not increase with the network size, 
and, finally, that our implementation requires only local communication 
confined to small network neighborhoods. In addition, we propose simple 
extensions to our algorithms to support dynamic networks with varying link 
qualities and node additions and deletions. Using link quality traces 
collected from a real sensor network deployment, we demonstrate the 
effectiveness of our algorithms in realistic multi-hop sensor networks.