In this paper, we present near-optimal transmission policies for bursty traffic sources on noisy wireless channels. We propose to minimize the packet outage probability subject to average power and average delay constraints over a class of deterministic policies. The proposed class of policies are a combination of a leaky-bucket variant, power control and variable rate coding. A lower bound for the achievable performance of the proposed policies is computed, and the near-optimality of the proposed methods is shown for the AWGN and Gilbert-Elliot fading channels. We show that even for a Gaussian channel, the optimal policy involves variable rate coding and power control due to traffic burstiness.