Real-Time Variable-to-Fixed Lossless Source Coding of Randomly Arriving Symbols

We address the recently suggested problem of causal lossless coding of randomly arriving source samples. We construct variable-to-fixed coding schemes and show that they outperform the previously considered fixed-to-variable schemes when traffic is high, in terms of both delay and Age of Information by appealing to tools from queueing theory. We supplement our theoretical bounds with numerical simulations.