Abstract — In this paper, we study the performance of non-cooperative wireless multiple access systems with noisy separated channels, where correlated sources communicate to an access point (AP) in presence of block-faded links. Our goal is to explore the potential benefits which can be obtained when source correla-tion is exploited at the AP, comparing the performance with that obtained by using distributed source coding (DSC) at the nodes. We consider both the average bit error probability and the outage probability as performance indicators, and we derive a theoretical approach to evaluate their limits. Our results show that the improvement brought by the exploitation of the correlation at the AP is more evident when the correlation beco...