The articles in this special issue focus on fundamental approaches to network coding in wireless communications systems. Wireless communication network providers are constantly striving for more efficient and reliable service provision to billions of customers across the globe. As such, there exist great opportunities in the research and development of advanced network coding techniques in emerging wireless communication systems and applications for further improving network capacity and performance. Arguably, bandwidth-hungry applications,such as multimedia, are to benefit the most from the many advantages that wireless network coding can offer, particularly higher throughputs, lower delays, and better scalability. Wireless network coding has a great potential to be applied at the physical layer, harnessing inherent interference in the wireless channel for more spectral efficiency. It can significantly enhance the performance of relay-based, device-to-device, and cooperative communication techniques in current and future wireless systems. © 1983-2012 IEEE.