Network coding is a promising technology that increases system throughput by reducing the number of packet transmissions from the source node to the destination node in a saturated traffic scenario. Nevertheless, some packets can suffer from end-to-end delay, because of a queuing delay in an intermediate node waiting for other packets to be encoded with exclusive or (XOR). In this paper, we analyze the delay according to packet arrival rate and propose two network coding schemes, iXOR (Intelligent XOR) and oXOR (Optimal XOR) with Markov Decision Process (MDP). They reduce the average delay, even under an unsaturated traffic load, through the Holding-${chi}$ strategy. In particular, we are interested in the unsaturated network scenario. The unsaturated network is more practical because, in a real wireless network, nodes do not always have packets waiting to be sent. Through analysis and extensive simulations, we show that iXOR and oXOR are better than the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) without XOR (the general forwarding scheme) and XOR with DCF with respect to average delay as well as delivery ratio.