  We study an interacting particle system whose dynamics depends on an
interacting random environment. As the number of particles grows large, the
transition rate of the particles slows down (perhaps because they share a
common resource of fixed capacity). The transition rate of a particle is
determined by its state, by the empirical distribution of all the particles and
by a rapidly varying environment. The transitions of the environment are
determined by the empirical distribution of the particles. We prove the
propagation of chaos on the path space of the particles and establish that the
limiting trajectory of the empirical measure of the states of the particles
satisfies a deterministic differential equation. This deterministic
differential equation involves the time averages of the environment process.
  We apply our results to analyze the performance of communication networks
where users access some resources using random distributed multi-access
algorithms. For these networks, we show that the environment process
corresponds to a process describing the number of clients in a certain loss
network, which allows us provide simple and explicit expressions of the network
performance.
