  The problem of remotely stabilizing a noisy linear time invariant plant over
a Gaussian relay network is addressed. The network is comprised of a sensor
node, a group of relay nodes and a remote controller. The sensor and the relay
nodes operate subject to an average transmit power constraint and they can
cooperate to communicate the observations of the plant's state to the remote
controller. The communication links between all nodes are modeled as Gaussian
channels. Necessary as well as sufficient conditions for mean-square
stabilization over various network topologies are derived. The sufficient
conditions are in general obtained using delay-free linear policies and the
necessary conditions are obtained using information theoretic tools. Different
settings where linear policies are optimal, asymptotically optimal (in certain
parameters of the system) and suboptimal have been identified. For the case
with noisy multi-dimensional sources controlled over scalar channels, it is
shown that linear time varying policies lead to minimum capacity requirements,
meeting the fundamental lower bound. For the case with noiseless sources and
parallel channels, non-linear policies which meet the lower bound have been
identified.
