Embodiments concern managing traffic in a radio device. While classifying user-plane packets from multiple applications according to quality of service requirements, a specific user-plane packet is classified as/determined to be a predetermined special-type packet (e.g., the special-type packets establish a new TCP/IP connection for a newly activated application). Based on that, that specific user-plane packet is mapped to a pre-defined radio bearer associated with a preconfigured priority, for example a highest priority among all bearers to which any of these user-plane packets from the multiple applications are mapped. Then all the mapped user-plane packets are scheduled for transmission according to their respective priorities. For example, the specific user-plane packet could be a SDU having a SYN, SYN-ACK or ACK, and the network convergence sub-layer (NCS) constructs a L2 NCS PDU using a designated format with the SDU in the payload and context information in the header.