AbstractNetwork design consists of evaluating cell coverage and capacity and may involve many parameters related to environment, system configuration and quality of service requirements. The key parameter for cost optimised Long Term Evolution (LTE)‐based network dimensioning is to provide a tight approximation of the effective signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) distribution. This paper provides a novel framework for LTE and LTE‐advanced network dimensioning, where the classical single‐carrier SINR performance evaluation is extended to multi‐carriers systems operating over frequency selective channels. Extension is achieved by expressing the link outage probability in terms of the statistics of the effective SINR. For effective SINR computation, the exponential effective SINR mapping technique is used. Closed‐form expression for the link outage probability is achieved assuming a log skew normal approximation for single‐carrier case. Then we rely on the log‐normal approximation to express the exponential effective SINR distribution as a function of the mean and standard deviation of the SINR of a generic subcarrier. Effective SINR values are evaluated at click speed in each point on the network. Simulations show that the proposed framework provides results with accuracy within 0.5 dB for any defined outage probability target. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.