For nonlinear systems that are known to be globally asymptotically
stabilizable, control over networks introduces a major challenge because of the
asynchrony in the transmission schedule. Maintaining global asymptotic
stabilization in sampled-data implementations with zero-order hold and with
perturbations in the sampling schedule is not achievable in general but we show
in this paper that it is achievable for the class of feedforward systems. We
develop sampled-data feedback stabilizers which are not approximations of
continuous-time designs but are discontinuous feedback laws that are
specifically developed for maintaining global asymptotic stabilizability under
any sequence of sampling periods that is uniformly bounded by a certain
"maximum allowable sampling period".Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures, submitted for possible publication to SIAM
Journal Control and Optimization. Second version with added remark