To deal with time delay in the interconnection and dead-zone nonlinearity in the input, a new decentralized variable structure control (DVSC) law is proposed for a class of uncertain large-scale system (LSS) in this paper. The developed DVSC for the interconnected systems is realized independently through the delay terms. The applied control effort of the DVSC law is always out of the dead-band to eliminate the effects arisen from the dead-zone nonlinearity in the input function. In the sliding mode, it can be seen that the invariance condition also holds. It is worth noting that the traditional large-scale time-delayed system is only a special case in this work. Illustrative examples are given to verify the validity of the developed controller. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.