The recent decades are characterized by an important evolution of the Internet at all planes, covering applications and network technologies. This evolution results on new applications requirements and new networks constraints making classical protocols (TCP and UDP typically) less and less suitable. Consequently, many new more efficient protocols have been proposed. However, due to several limitations of the actual Transport layer, these new protocols have not been deployed.From this statement, the work presented in this thesis is about the proposition and the realization of an architecture for the Transport layer, including extensibility and auto-adaptability capabilities regarding the evolution of application and network context. The pro...