The invention relates to an antenna selection-based multi-antenna network coding relay transmission method, which belongs to the technical field of wireless communication. The method comprises that: two users in a wireless communication network transmit information sequences to a base station and a relay in an orthogonal channel, and the base station and the relay perform channel estimation according to the information sequences to obtain a channel matrix, and decode the information sequences; the base station estimates the quality of each antenna data stream according to the channel matrix, generates a relay packet for network coding and transmits the relay packet to the relay, and the relay transmits a network coding data stream to the base station; and the base station performs joint decoding according to the information sequences and a relay forwarding sequence to finish relay transmission. The method provided by the invention improves the transmission efficiency of a system so asto increase a frequency spectrum utilization rate by utilizing multi-antenna transmission and network coding, and reduces a bit error rate and improves the reliability of the system by utilizing the transmission quality of the antenna data streams and the characteristics of network coding-based cooperative relay.