In this paper a method for optimal off-line scheduling of a limited resource used for control purposes is presented. For various reasons, real-time communication channels are prone to have-limited bandwidth. To overcome this obstacle, the rate of actions must be chosen accordingly at design time, both with respect to the limitation of the resource and to control performance. A resulting off-line schedule implements the rate of actions as a repetitive sequence of communication instants. Periodic control theory is used to define a cost functional for LQ-control, that measures the performance of a sampled-data system in relation to a desired continuous time performance. In contrast to uniform sampling, the communication sequence is here allowed to be time-varying. This approach results in a complex combinatorial optimization problem, whose solution gives the optimal off-line schedule, i.e., the sequence in which the actions should take place. The optimization problem is solved by a neighborhood search method where a heuristic method is used to generate initial guesses close to the optimum. The optimal schedule is typically such that the sampling is non-uniform, but the resulting LQ-control law is time-varying and takes this non-uniform sampling into account. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.