The recommended way to build something on top of ndnSIM is to fork its scenario template repository and work inside there. You still need to download and compile the actual framework, however you will simply install it into /usr/local
and link to it instead of actually working inside the main repository.
It turns out that this workflow actually makes certain tasks a lot more difficult. You might think a network simulator would make it easy to add new header fields to packets. Well, think again.