When is a Message Decodable Over Fading Channels?

We investigate the distribution of decoding times for frequency-flat fading channels when the information block size is fixed to a finite value a priori but codeword length is not. We characterize the distribution of decoding times for block-fading channels in a computable form and demonstrate that the resulting distribution is discontinuous at block boundaries. We make suggestions regarding coding strategies based on these distributions and discuss the benefits of rateless coding in this setting