SummaryIn this article, the sliding mode control (SMC) problem is investigated for a class of networked state‐saturated systems. In the underlying system, the system states are saturated and unmeasured, and the communication along the sensor‐to‐controller channel is regulated by the weighted try‐once‐discard protocol under which only one sensor node is permitted to transmit data at each instant. The key issue of the addressed problem is how to design both the state observer and the observer‐based sliding mode controller in the presence of protocol scheduling and state saturation. A token‐dependent state‐saturated observer is first constructed, and a desired SMC law is then designed with aid of the updating rule for the actually received measurement. Sufficient conditions are established to guarantee both the asymptotic stability of the SMC system and the reachability of the specified sliding surface. The algorithm for acquiring the desired controller gain matrices is proposed in terms of a convex optimization problem. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed observer‐based SMC design scheme is verified by a simulation example.