In this work, we investigate the value of separate handling of control and data traffic in a networked sense-and-response application. Our results show that while the separate handling of control and data does indeed result in a decrease in the round-trip control-loop delay, and a consequent increase in the number ofdata samples examined during each pass through the system’s control loop, the gain in sensing accuracy is relatively small, except at very high loads; we find a similar result for the performance of the meteorological tracking application. We show, however, that because sensing accuracy both improves and degrades slowly in the number of sensed values obtained, the system is robust in that it can still perform well in the case of severe overload, but only in the case that control messages receive priority and remain unaffected by data overload.