You can run a self-hosting WCF service as a console app, then just leave it to run in the background. To invoke it, build the console app into an exe and run it whenever you need it.
This is how I test my WCF services before I deploy them to IIS.
See my example WCF service that I have posted on Github which contains a self-hosted WCF service as a console app
https://github.com/DomBurf/ExampleWCFSolution[
^]