This paper proposes a retransmission persistence control scheme for automatic retransmit request (ARQ) protocol to improve the reliability of a wireless link. Most existing ARQ protocols adopt a fixed retransmission persistence. If the ARQ protocol sets the retransmission persistence too low, there is a limitation in providing transmission reliability. On the other hand, if the ARQ protocol sets the retransmission persistence too high, it increases transmission delay and jitter. In order to figure out the problem, the proposed scheme considers the number of frames in the buffer in controlling the retransmission persistence; it improves the throughput of ARQ protocol by increasing the retransmission persistence when the number of frames is small and decreasing otherwise. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme decreases the transmission delay and jitter significantly comparing to the existing schemes.