Asymptotically Optimal Joint Source-Channel Coding with Minimal Delay

We present and analyze a joint source-channel coding strategy for the transmission of a Gaussian source across a Gaussian channel in n channel uses per source symbol. Among all such strategies, the scheme presented here has the following properties: i) the resulting mean-squared error scales optimally with the signal-to-noise ratio, and ii) the scheme is easy to implement and the incurred delay is minimal, in the sense that a single source symbol is encoded at a time.