This paper provides a unified framework to study the performance of successive interference cancellation (SIC) in wireless networks with arbitrary fading distribution and power-law path loss. An analytical characterization of the performance of SIC is given as a function of different system parameters. The results suggest that the marginal benefit of enabling the receiver to successively decode k users diminishes very fast with k, especially in networks of high dimensions and small path loss exponent. On the other hand, SIC is highly beneficial when the users are clustered around the receiver and/or very low-rate codes are used. Also, with multiple packet reception, a lower per-user information rate always results in higher aggregate throughput in interference-limited networks. In contrast, there exists a positive optimal per-user rate that maximizes the aggregate throughput in noisy networks. The analytical results serve as useful tools to understand the potential gain of SIC in heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs). Using these tools, this paper quantifies the gain of SIC on the coverage probability in HCNs with non-accessible base stations. An interesting observation is that, for contemporary narrow-band systems (e.g., LTE and WiFi), most of the gain of SIC is achieved by canceling a single interferer.