  Wireless sensor networks are usually composed of a large number of nodes, and
with the increasing processing power and power consumption efficiency they are
expected to run more complex protocols in the future. These pose problems in
the field of verification and performance evaluation of wireless networks. In
this paper, we tailor the mean-field theory as a modeling technique to analyze
their behavior. We apply this method to the slotted ALOHA protocol, and
establish results on the long term trends of the protocol within a very large
network, specially regarding the stability of ALOHA-type protocols.
