This paper proposes a control scheme for the load frequency control (LFC) problem of multi-area power systems. These systems are treated as interconnected dynamical systems. In the design of the proposed controller, each local area network is overlapped with states representing the interconnections with the other local area networks in the global system. Then, a decentralized control scheme is developed as function of the local area state variables and those resulting from the overlapped states which represent an approximation of the interconnection variables. The proposed controller guarantees the asymptotic stability of the overall closed loop system. The simulation results indicate that the proposed control scheme works well. In addition, they show that the controlled system is robust to changes in the parameters of the power system and to bounded input disturbances acting on the system. Moreover, the simulation results show that the controlled system behaves well even when there is a maximum limit on the rate of change in power generation.