A conceptual design methodology is proposed for event-triggered based communication for wide-area damping controller in power systems. The event-triggering mechanism is adopted to reduce the communication burden between the origin of the remote signal and the wide-area damping controller (WADC) location. The remote signal is transmitted to the WADC only when an event-triggering condition based on a predefined system output, is satisfied. The triggering condition is derived from a stability criterion, and is monitored continuously by a separate event-monitoring unit located at the origin of the remote signal. The stability of the resulting closed-loop system is guaranteed via the input-to-state stability technique. The proposed event-triggered WADC is implemented on two typical test power systems - two area four machine and IEEE 39-bus 10-machine. The validation of proposed mechanism is carried out through non-linear simulation studies on MATLAB/Simulink platform. The numerical results show the efficacy of the controller in managing the communication channel usage without compromising the stated system stability objectives. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2016.