  Existing works on cell-free systems consider either coherent or non-coherent
downlink data transmission and a network deployment with a single central
processing unit (CPU). While it is known that coherent transmission outperforms
noncoherent transmission when assuming unlimited fronthaul links, the former
requires a perfect timing synchronization, which is practically not viable over
a large network. Furthermore, relying on a single CPU for geographically large
cell-free networks is not scalable. Thus, to realize the expected gains of
cellfree systems in practice, alternative transmission strategies for realistic
multi-CPU cell-free systems are required. Therefore, this paper proposes a
novel downlink data transmission scheme that combines and generalizes the
existing coherent and non-coherent transmissions. The proposed transmission
scheme, named mixed transmission, works based on the realistic assumption that
only the access points (APs) controlled by a same CPU are synchronized, and
thus transmit in a coherent fashion, while APs from different CPUs require no
synchronism and transmit in a non-coherent manner. We also propose extensions
of existing clustering algorithms for multi-CPU cell-free systems with mixed
transmission. Simulation results show that the combination of the proposed
clustering algorithms with mixed transmission have the potential to perform
close to the ideal coherent transmission.
