•A novel string stability criterion by dividing a mixed vehicular platoon into multiple interconnected sub-systems.•A practical string stability criterion for a mixed vehicular platoon over predominant acceleration frequency boundaries.•A new CAV control strategy incorporating human-driven vehicles’ car following characteristics.•A new CAV control strategy to stabilize mixed vehicular platoons with guaranteed feasibility. This paper presents a car-following control strategy of connected automated vehicles (CAVs) to stabilize a mixed vehicular platoon consisting of CAVs and human-driven vehicles. This study first establishes a string stability criterion for a mixed vehicular platoon. Specifically, a mixed vehicular platoon is decomposed into “subsystems” that are all possible sequential subsets of the platoon. String stability is then defined as the “head-to-tail” string stability for all subsystems: the magnitude of a disturbance is not amplified from the first vehicle to the last vehicle of each subsystem. Based on this definition, distributed frequency-domain-based CAV control is proposed to increase the number of head-to-tail string stable subsystems and consequently dampen stop-and-go disturbances drastically. Specifically, an H-infinity control problem is formulated, where the maximum disturbance “damping ratios” in each subsystem is minimized within the predominant acceleration frequency boundaries of human-driven vehicles. Simulation experiments, embedded with real human-driven vehicle trajectories, were conducted, and results show that the proposed control can effectively dampen stop-and-go disturbances.