Book excerpt: The research focus of Rahamatullah Khondoker is on Future Internet Architectures, Network Security, Software-Defined Networking, and Network Function Virtualization. In his PhD thesis, the author tackles challenges of today’s layered network architecture (such as TCP/IP protocol stack) which is inflexible. He proposes that the evolution of the network can be achieved by first, decoupling applications from the networks and second, selecting the best network or protocol automatically based on the applications’ requirements. With the provided language, applications are able to express their requirements, and networks expose their capabilities such that the most appropriate network and protocol are selected automatically.