We consider a multi-way relay network with an orthogonal uplink and
correlated sources, and we characterise reliable communication (in the usual
Shannon sense) with a single-letter expression. The characterisation is
obtained using a joint source-channel random-coding argument, which is based on
a combination of Wyner et al.'s "Cascaded Slepian-Wolf Source Coding" and
Tuncel's "Slepian-Wolf Coding over Broadcast Channels". We prove a separation
theorem for the special case of two nodes; that is, we show that a modular code
architecture with separate source and channel coding functions is
(asymptotically) optimal. Finally, we propose a practical coding scheme based
on low-density parity-check codes, and we analyse its performance using
multi-edge density evolution.Comment: Authors' final version (accepted and to appear in IEEE Transactions
on Communications