Recently, there has been a growing interest of using network coding to
support reliable unicast over an error-prone channel. However, previous network
coding schemes focused only on native packets and ignored the role of encoded
packets. In this paper, we develop an efficient retransmission approach with
network coding method, namely Encoded packet-Assisted Rescue (EAR), which is
able to overcome this limitation. Using the proposed network coding approach,
clients store the overheard encoded packets and report to the sender. And then,
when the sender makes coding decisions, it not only considers native packets,
but also takes account of encoded packets. In this way, more coding
opportunities are emerged, i.e. more packets can be mixed together, resulting
in improving the retransmission efficiency. Moreover, theoretical analysis and
simulation results show that comparing with the existing schemes, our schemes
can greatly reduce the total number of retransmissions.