Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an increasingly growing topic of interest in the research community. Its requirements meet those of the next generation 5G mobile communication system which is expected to be an enabling technology for IoT, where networks of large numbers of sensors require massive connectivity demands. As polar codes have strongly entered into action within the standardization of 5G, this paper proposes and investigates the use of systematic polar codes for joint-source channel coding of correlated sources thus allowing, on one hand, the compression of the volume of data to be transmitted over the network, and on the other hand, the protection of this data from channel impairments. Results show that systematic polar codes can achieve a distributed compression with rates close to the theoretical bound, with better error rates obtained for larger blocks. However, stronger compression and shorter block lengths allow for a better robustness against transmission errors.