  Unlike the AWGN (additive white gaussian noise) channel, fading channels
suffer from random channel gains besides the additive Gaussian noise. As a
result, the instantaneous channel capacity varies randomly along time, which
makes it insufficient to characterize the transmission capability of a fading
channel using data rate only. In this paper, the transmission capability of a
buffer-aided block Rayleigh fading channel is examined by a constant rate input
data stream, and reflected by several parameters such as the average queue
length, stationary queue length distribution, packet delay and overflow
probability. Both infinite-buffer model and finite-buffer model are considered.
Taking advantage of the memoryless property of the service provided by the
channel in each block in the the low SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) regime, the
information transmission over the channel is formulated as a \textit{discrete
time discrete state} $D/G/1$ queueing problem. The obtained results show that
block fading channels are unable to support a data rate close to their ergodic
capacity, no matter how long the buffer is, even seen from the application
layer. For the finite-buffer model, the overflow probability is derived with
explicit expression, and is shown to decrease exponentially when buffer size is
increased, even when the buffer size is very small.
