Hello. I am working on incorporating some MAC functionalities from the 802.11e standard and later based on this some ideas from the 802.11s draft into ns-2 (version 2.34) for my thesis. After some analysis I thought that the new 802.11 MAC (found in mac-802_11Ext) should be a good basis and the authors consider their modular design to be easily extendable. However, simply extending the classes via inheritance seems impossible because most of the member variables and methods are declared private and I didn't want to touch the original files. I also guess that there is a reason for making them private in the first place, I just don't see it.
So far, the only choices I see are either changing the original file (which I don't want to), use inheritance but reimplement (copy) a lot of the former code to have it again accessible in the child classes or make a copy of the original files and adjust them to my needs. I'm leaning towards the last one but it still doesn't feel right. Is there a better way to do this? Thanks a lot. Regards, Karsten
