  We consider transmission of a continuous amplitude source over an L-block
Rayleigh fading $M_t \times M_r$ MIMO channel when the channel state
information is only available at the receiver. Since the channel is not
ergodic, Shannon's source-channel separation theorem becomes obsolete and the
optimal performance requires a joint source -channel approach. Our goal is to
minimize the expected end-to-end distortion, particularly in the high SNR
regime. The figure of merit is the distortion exponent, defined as the
exponential decay rate of the expected distortion with increasing SNR. We
provide an upper bound and lower bounds for the distortion exponent with
respect to the bandwidth ratio among the channel and source bandwidths. For the
lower bounds, we analyze three different strategies based on layered source
coding concatenated with progressive, superposition or hybrid digital/analog
transmission. In each case, by adjusting the system parameters we optimize the
distortion exponent as a function of the bandwidth ratio. We prove that the
distortion exponent upper bound can be achieved when the channel has only one
degree of freedom, that is L=1, and $\min\{M_t,M_r\}=1$. When we have more
degrees of freedom, our achievable distortion exponents meet the upper bound
for only certain ranges of the bandwidth ratio. We demonstrate that our
results, which were derived for a complex Gaussian source, can be extended to
more general source distributions as well.
