A butterfly network is a classical model to demonstrate the throughput advantage of the network coding technique over wireline networks. We are curious about what happens if the wireless network is considered instead, especially for the multiple-antenna scenarios. In this letter, we study this problem and aim to fully characterize the degrees of freedom (DoF) region for the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) butterfly network in the general setting. It turns out that significant DoF gains can be achieved if more advanced interference managem...
