Tandem queueing systems often arise in wireless networks modeling. Queueing models are very suitable for network performance evaluation but the system complexity exponential growth (or state space explosion) could make the analysis barely feasible. The paper presents a comparative study of various methods of a state space reduction for markovian arrival processes (MAP) and phase-type distributions (PH) applied to tandem queueing systems. The applied methods include non- linear optimization, EM-algorithm and linear minimization. While most of the described algorithms are well-studied, a number of issues arises when applying them to a tandem system of a real wireless network. Particularly, it is shown that while all the algorithms could be applied to tandems with a small number of queues, bigger tandems require ad- ditional eort to get the appropriable results. Nevertheless, the results presented show that the departure MAPs reduction may help to solve the state space explosion problem.