Data download and storage over wireless networks is a popular application for various multimedia such as images, audio, and video files. In such applications, the end-user may listen to or watch the downloaded media in real-time, and/or will playback the downloaded file multiple times in the future. Consequently, improving the quality of the stored multimedia will be highly desirable by the end-user, even if the initial real-time version had less quality. Therefore, this work proposes a novel technique to improve the throughput of wireless networks that adopt  nonorthogonal transmission and automatic repeat request (ARQ). Unlike conventional systems, the proposed scheme stores the dropped data packets for further offline processing where some packets can be recovered by applying successive interfer-ence cancellation (SIC) in a retroactive manner. Consequently, the proposed packet repair and recovery (PRR) scheme can improve the reliability of the received data without additional packet retransmission, which may offer a significant throughput gain. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, it is applied to image transmission for transportation systems. The obtained results confirm that a considerable portion of the dropped packets can be successfully recovered and the visual quality of the received image can be improved. In particular scenarios, the obtained results show that the proposed PRR technique managed to reduce the packet drop rate (PDR) from 10^{−1} to 10^{−3}, i.e., 100 fold, which implies that 99% of the packets that were initially dropped were successfully recovered.