  Transmission of a Gaussian source over a time-varying multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) channel is studied under strict delay constraints.
Availability of a correlated side information at the receiver is assumed, whose
quality, i.e., correlation with the source signal, also varies over time. A
block-fading model is considered for the states of the time-varying channel and
the time-varying side information; and perfect state information at the
receiver is assumed, while the transmitter knows only the statistics. The high
SNR performance, characterized by the \textit{distortion exponent}, is studied
for this joint source-channel coding problem. An upper bound is derived and
compared with lowers based on list decoding, hybrid digital-analog
transmission, as well as multi-layer schemes which transmit successive
refinements of the source, relying on progressive and superposed transmission
with list decoding. The optimal distortion exponent is characterized for the
single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input single-output (MISO)
scenarios by showing that the distortion exponent achieved by multi-layer
superpositon encoding with joint decoding meets the proposed upper bound. In
the MIMO scenario, the optimal distortion exponent is characterized in the low
bandwidth ratio regime, and it is shown that the multi-layer superposition
encoding performs very close to the upper bound in the high bandwidth expansion
regime.
