A system and method are provided to selectively increase the reliability for transmission of select data packets that are determined to be important or critical. When the data packets are PDUs arranged in PDU-SETs, a user plane function (UPF) receives the PDU-SETs from a content server, and, based on header information, e.g., the UPF filters the PDU-SETs according to respective reliability levels. For PDU-SETs in the highest reliability level, a manner of transmitting the PDU-SETs is modified to increase reliability of the transmission for at least part of the transmission path. For example, the redundancy of the PDUs in the PDU-SETs can be increased for one or more legs of the transmission path by generating duplicates of the PDUs, which are transmitted together with the original PDUs. Further, reliability can be increased for respective legs by transmitting the PDUs using an acknowledgement mode.