— This paper addresses a scheduling problem for wireless network coding which has been recently proposed as a novel method to enhance the throughput in wireless networks. The wireless network coding involves broadcast transmission of a network–coded packet which contains unicast data to several receiving nodes. These receiving nodes have time–varying fading links to the transmitting node, which can generate different instantaneous conditions for different links. In this paper, we introduce an opportunistic scheduling for such a wireless network coding, which selects a set of nodes whose packets are network– coded as well as the data rate for the broadcast transmission according to the instantaneous link conditions. We analyze the average capacity of such a scheduling, and discuss the impact of different parameters on the average capacity. We show that the opportunistic scheduling can maximize the average capacity by choosing the appropriate set of network–coded nodes accordin...