A system and method for realizing a Wyner-Ziv encoder may involve the following steps: (a) apply nested quantization to input data from an information source in order to generate intermediate data; and (b) encode the intermediate data using an asymmetric Slepian-Wolf encoder in order to generate compressed output data representing the input data. Similarly, a Wyner-Ziv decoder may be realized by: (1) applying an asymmetric Slepian-Wolf decoder to compressed input data using side information to generate intermediate values, and (b) jointly decoding the intermediate values using the side information to generate decompressed output data.