[asterisk-users] Asterisk as a distributed paging system

[Matteo Fortini]

I'm building a paging system composed of roughly 10 switches in daisy 
chain, with an embedded box with a speaker and a microphone for each 
switch. The embedded box runs my software.

I need the system to be resilient to any network partition, so that 
anyone can send announces from any mic to all the reachable clients. I'd 
need also to page a subset of all the speakers.

I'm currently using some software I wrote which sends voice over 
multicast RTP and coordinates all the sites with multicast messages.

I don't own the switches so each site will be assigned an address by 
DHCP, that's why I'm using multicast.

I heard of asterisk and SIP as a possible alternative to my software, 
and I'd rather use tested and widely adopted software.

Is there a way asterisk could be of use, or would I need to bend it too 
much?

Thank you in advance,
Matteo