Wireless indoor and outdoor microcells (WIOMs) have emerged as a promising means to deal with a high demand of mobile users for a variety of services. Over such heterogeneous networks, the deployment of WIOMs costs mobile/telecommunications company high capital expenditures and operating expenses. This paper aims at optimising the WIOMs taking into account various network communication environments. We first develop an optimisation problem to minimise the number of cells as well as determining

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... heir optimal locations subject to the constraints of the coverage and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. In particular, we propose a binary-search based cell positioning (BSCP) algorithm to find the optimal number of cells given a preset candidate antenna positions. The proposed BSCP algorithm is shown to not only reduce the number of cells for saving resources but also requires a low computational complexity compared to the conventional approaches with exhaustive search over all available sites. Moreover, EDX SignalPro is exploited as a simulation platform to verify the effectiveness of the proposed BSCP for the WIOMs with respect to various propagation modes and antenna parameters of different types, including isotropic, multiple-input single-output and multiple-input multiple-output.