This note addresses a controlled synchronization problem for chaotic systems involving a communication network with data packet dropout. A chaotic master system and its slave system are connected with a controller via a limited channel and data packet dropout is modeled as Bernoulli process. Then, a coder-decoder pair is designed with the controller such that the master system and the slave system are completely synchronized, not necessarily bounded for synchronization. Necessary data capacity of a channel is explicitly stated. Finally, a numerical example for the 3-double-scroll chaotic system is applied to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained result. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.