  In this paper, delay-limited transmission of quasi-stationary sources over
block fading channels are considered. Considering distortion outage probability
as the performance measure, two source and channel coding schemes with power
adaptive transmission are presented. The first one is optimized for fixed rate
transmission, and hence enjoys simplicity of implementation. The second one is
a high performance scheme, which also benefits from optimized rate adaptation
with respect to source and channel states. In high SNR regime, the performance
scaling laws in terms of outage distortion exponent and asymptotic outage
distortion gain are derived, where two schemes with fixed transmission power
and adaptive or optimized fixed rates are considered as benchmarks for
comparisons. Various analytical and numerical results are provided which
demonstrate a superior performance for source and channel optimized rate and
power adaptive scheme. It is also observed that from a distortion outage
perspective, the fixed rate adaptive power scheme substantially outperforms an
adaptive rate fixed power scheme for delay-limited transmission of
quasi-stationary sources over wireless block fading channels. The effect of the
characteristics of the quasi-stationary source on performance, and the
implication of the results for transmission of stationary sources are also
investigated.
