Abstract: Since pure theory network coding had some drawbacks in practical network, however current opportunistic network coding fully depends on overheard information. Thus, in a radically different way from network coding optimization, a novel opportunistic network coding scheme was proposed which was based on prediction (ONCP). The main idea of ONCP was：firstly, arrival time of next packet in a node was predicted for the self-similarity of network traffic; secondly, encoding time, waiting time for coding, transmission time and other factors were taken into account together to determine whether this packet was coded in this node. A theorem—maximum waiting time for was proved network coding in order to obtain throughput gain. Simulation results show that ONCP improves throughput by 15% compared to pure theory network coding and by 21% compared to traditional store-forward. ONCP can also effectively reduce energy con-sumption while improving throughput.