Practical constructions of lossless distributed source codes (for the Slepian-Wolf problem) have been the subject of much investigation in the past decade. In particular, near-capacity achieving code designs based on LDPC codes have been presented for the case of two binary sources, with a binary-symmetric correlation. However, constructing practical codes for the case of non-binary sources with arbitrary correlation remains open. 

In this work we propose the usage of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes for the symmetric and asymmetric versions of this problem. We show that the algebraic soft-decision decoding of RS codes can be used effectively under certain correlation structures. In addition, RS codes offer natural rate adaptivity and performance that remains constant across a family of correlation structures with the same conditional entropy.  The performance of RS codes is compared with dedicated and rate adaptive multistage LDPC codes (Varodayan et al. '06), where each LDPC code is used to compress the individual bit planes. Our results show that RS codes outperform both dedicated and rate-adaptive LDPC codes under $q$-ary symmetric correlation, and are better than rate-adaptive LDPC codes in the case of sparse correlation models, where the conditional distribution of the sources has only a few dominant entries.