The revolutionary developments of the communication technologies in the recent decades have enabled the emergence and rapid development of a new form of control systems, that is, control systems over communication networks. Such systems feature the use of various data communication networks to close the control loop, where networks may not be specifically designed for the control purpose. The use of non-control-dedicated communication networks brings the system much flexibility of design, lower overall cost, finally allowing many control systems at very large scale, and many new forms of intelligent systems such as Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems. However, despite these great present and potential achievements, the theoretical and practical foundations of control systems over communication networks are far from complete: How can we ensure reliable control performance over various unreliable communication networks? How should we deal with the trade-off of the control performance and the QoP of the communication network? Many such challenges are yet to be addressed.

This special issue aims at reporting both the theoretical and practical advances in the general areas of control systems over communication networks. We welcome all submissions addressing any remaining issue in control systems over communication networks (the design of communication protocols subject to control needs, the design of control algorithms subject to communication constraints, the analysis of the closed-loop system performance such as the techniques ensuring global asymptotic stability for the associated control loops despite the existence of communication constraints, etc.). We especially welcome original submissions that either considers the characteristics of wireless communication, or codesign control and communication, or proposes practical solutions to real-world systems. We also encourage the submission of review articles which describe the current state of the art of the field.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Control-oriented communication protocol design
• Control methods to deal with nonlinearity, state estimation, and so on in the presence of communication networks
• Compensation for communication constrains using control methods such as global linearization, approximate linearization, Lyapunov theory, and Kalman filter
• Wireless communication modelling for control purpose
• Communication challenges in multiagent systems
• Security and privacy of control systems over communication networks
• Codesign of control, communication, and computation
• Control optimization subject to communication constraints
• Control design over ad hoc networks and sensor networks
• Applications of any kind related to the referred general research field