Event-triggered control is a novel control implementation strategy where control signal is updated in aperiodic manner such that the stability of the system is retained. Here, event condition is continuously monitored to generate the triggering instant. So, this minimizes resource utilization and control effort while achieving certain control objective. Recently, event-triggered sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed in [25, 31] to ensure the robust stability in the presence of disturbance. In this strategy also, the plant state is continuously monitored for generating possible triggering instant. In order to avoid this continuous measurement, we propose an event-triggering strategy which evaluates the event at periodic interval only known as discrete event-triggered control. This strategy is very appealing if the state measurements are available only at periodic intervals. Here, with this discrete state measurements, the discrete event-triggered SMC is designed to guarantee the system stability. The event is detected only at periodic intervals and the control signal is updated whenever it is violated at these periodic instants. So, there is always a guaranteed lower bound for inter event time which is the time between two sampled measurements. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018.