Consider the problem of stabilizing large-scale systems by distributed controllers, where the controllers exchange information via a shared limited communication medium. Event-triggered sampling schemes are proposed, in which each system decides when to transmit new information across the network based on the crossing of some error thresholds, which only depend on information locally available at individual subsystems. Stability of the interconnected large-scale system is inferred by applying a generalized small-gain theorem. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.