The present disclosure provides various mechanisms to improve the communication of critical data, such as extended reality (XR) data, cloud gaming (CG) data, ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) data, internet of things (IoT) data, and/or any other type of high priority data/traffic. The described mechanisms include enhancements to buffer status reporting mechanisms; packet, protocol data unit (PDU), and/or service data unit (SDU) discard mechanisms; mechanisms to resolve issues related to system frame number (SFN) wraparound; and network congestion detection mechanisms. Other embodiments may be described and/or claimed.