The high expectations of performance and availability for wireless mobile systems has presented great challenges in the modelling and design of fault tolerant wireless systems. The proper modelling methodology to study the degradation of such systems is so‐called performability modelling. In this paper, we give overview of approaches for the construction and the solution of performability models for wireless cellular networks. First, we start with the Erlang loss model, in which hierarchical and composite Markov chains are constructed to obtain loss formulas for a system with channel failures. Consequently, we develop two level hierarchical models for the wireless cellular system with handoff and channel failures. Then, for a TDMA system consisting of base repeaters and a control channel, we build a hierarchical Markov chain model for automatic protection switching (APS). Finally, we discuss stochastic reward net (SRN) models for performability analysis of wireless systems. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.