SummaryThis paper addresses a study of fault‐tolerant control (FTC) for wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) in industrial automatic processes. The WNCSs is composed of many subsystems, which operate with different sampling cycles. In order to meet the real‐time requirements and ensure a deterministic data transmission, the time division multiple access (TDMA) mechanism is adopted in WNCSs. The data in WNCSs are transmitted following a TDMA‐based scheduler. According to the periodicity, WNCSs integrated with the scheduler is first formulated as discrete linear time periodic systems (LTPSs). Afterwards, a fault estimation method for LTPSs is developed under a H∞ performance specification with a regional pole constraint. With the achieved state observer and fault estimator, an FTC strategy for LTPSs is explored. Finally, the proposed methods are verified on a physical experimental WiNC platform. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.