While we can observe a fast evolution and innovation of link-layer technologies and networked applications, the core Internet architecture with TCP/IP remains rigid. New protocols and networking paradigms exist but suffer from global deployment issues, acceptance, and use by application developers. In order to address these problems, we previously proposed NENA, a framework that aims at a better decoupling of applications and networks. In this paper, we evaluate the framework’s concepts and interfaces to determine the minimum set of invariants needed to operate protocol families that differ in their basic abstractions and paradigms. We demonstrate that it is possible to realize a framework for multiple diverse protocols and paradigms while introducing only a small set of invariants.