  With the increased demand for power efficiency in feedback-control systems,
communication is becoming a limiting factor, raising the need to trade off the
external cost that they incur with the capacity of the controller's
communication channels. With a proper design of the channels, this translates
into a sequential rate-distortion problem, where we minimize the rate of
information required for the controller's operation under a constraint on its
external cost. Memoryless controllers are of particular interest both for the
simplicity and frugality of their implementation and as a basis for studying
more complex controllers. In this paper we present the optimality principle for
memoryless linear controllers that utilize minimal information rates to achieve
a guaranteed external-cost level. We also study the interesting and useful
phenomenology of the optimal controller, such as the principled reduction of
its order.
