In this paper, a decentralized adaptive control scheme is proposed to address output tracking of a class of interconnected time-delay subsystems with the input of each loop preceded by an unknown dead-zone. Each local controller is designed using the backstepping technique and consists of a new robust control law and new updating laws. Unknown time-varying delays are compensated by using appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals. Furthermore, by introducing a new smooth dead-zone inverse, the proposed backstepping design is able to eliminate the effects resulting from dead-zone nonlinearities in the input. It is shown that the proposed controller can guarantee not only stability, but also good transient performance. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.