Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is an effective means of multi-packet reception to combat interference at the physical layer. We investigate the joint optimization issue of channel access and power control for capacity maximization in SIC-enabled wireless networks. We propose a new interference model to characterize the sequential detection nature of SIC. Afterward, we formulize the joint optimization problem, prove it to be a nondeterministic polynomial-time-hard problem, and

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... a novel approximation approach based on the genetic algorithm (GA). Finally, we discuss the design and parameter setting of the GA approach and validate its performance through extensive simulations.