  In this paper, we address two crucial challenges in the design of cell-free
(CF) systems: degradation in the performance of CF systems by imperfect channel
state information at the transmitter (CSIT) and high computational/signaling
loads arising from the increasing number of distributed antennas and parameters
to be exchanged. To mitigate the effects of imperfect CSIT, we employ
rate-splitting (RS) multiple-access, which separates the messages into common
and private streams. Unlike prior works, we present a clustered CF multi-user
multiple-antenna framework with RS, which groups the transmit antennas in
several clusters to reduce the computational and signaling loads. The proposed
RS-CF system employs one common stream per cluster to exploit the network
diversity. Furthermore, we propose new cluster-based linear precoders for this
framework. We then devise a power allocation strategy for the common and
private streams within clusters and derive closed-form expressions for the
sum-rate performance of the proposed cluster-based RS-CF system. Numerical
results show that the proposed clustered RS-CF system and algorithms outperform
existing approaches. % in terms of the sum-rate.
