With the deep coupling between the electrical power systems and cyber systems, there is a increasingly detrimental effect of the communication delays and packet losses on the load frequency control (LFC) performance. Traditional methods mainly focus on guaranteeing the asymptotic stability in maximum delay case but ignore improving the system dynamic performance. The resulting designed controller cannot satisfy the actual operational requirements completely. Hence, this paper investigates a novel decentralized LFC strategy based on switching control theory. First, the networked LFC system is modelled as a series of subsystems with transmission delay as the switching decision variable. Compared with the existing modelling methods, our modelling approach can depict the influences of time delay and packet loss on system dynamics more accurately. Second, a memoryless state-feedback control design scheme is proposed. Design constraints are deduced by constructing a Lyapunov function and then presented in a bilinear matrix inequality form. To improve the system dynamic performance in power mismatch and communication change case, an iterative linear matrix inequality (LMI) algorithm is proposed. Finally, simulation results illustrate that our proposed method can restore the frequency deviation to zero quickly.