  In wireless networks, communication links may be subject to random fatal
impacts: for example, sensor networks under sudden power losses or cognitive
radio networks with unpredictable primary user spectrum occupancy. Under such
circumstances, it is critical to quantify how fast and reliably the information
can be collected over attacked links. For a single point-to-point channel
subject to a random attack, named as a \emph{dying channel}, we model it as a
block-fading (BF) channel with a finite and random delay constraint. First, we
define the outage capacity as the performance measure, followed by studying the
optimal coding length $K$ such that the outage probability is minimized when
uniform power allocation is assumed. For a given rate target and a coding
length $K$, we then minimize the outage probability over the power allocation
vector $\mv{P}_{K}$, and show that this optimization problem can be cast into a
convex optimization problem under some conditions. The optimal solutions for
several special cases are discussed.
  Furthermore, we extend the single point-to-point dying channel result to the
parallel multi-channel case where each sub-channel is a dying channel, and
investigate the corresponding asymptotic behavior of the overall outage
probability with two different attack models: the independent-attack case and
the $m$-dependent-attack case. It can be shown that the overall outage
probability diminishes to zero for both cases as the number of sub-channels
increases if the \emph{rate per unit cost} is less than a certain threshold.
The outage exponents are also studied to reveal how fast the outage probability
improves over the number of sub-channels.
