A wireless communication system includes an intermediate node, a first node and a second node. A apparatus for implementing MIMO based network coding, comprises the first node transmitting first data to the intermediate node, and the second node transmitting second data to the intermediate node. Both the first node and the second node may use spatial multiplexing or time division multiplexing or frequency division multiplexing on a common/different resource. The intermediate node receives the transmissions from the first node and second node, and performs network coding on the first data and second data using a predefined network coding scheme to produce network coded information. The intermediate node transmits the network coded information to the first node and second node using multi-user MIMO and each first or second node receives the MIMO transmissions from the intermediate node and applies network decoding procedures to recover the first data and second data.