The Multicast Capacity of Acyclic, Deterministic Relay Networks with No Interference

The multicast capacity is determined for acyclic networks that have deterministic links with broadcasting at the transmitters and no interference at the receivers. Such networks were studied by M. R. Aref, and are here called Aref networks. The multicast capacity is shown to have a max-flow, min-cut interpretation. This result complements existing theory for networks of directed channels, networks of undirected channels, and packet erasure networks. It is also shown that one cannot always separate channel and network coding in Aref networks.