The recent advanced wireless energy harvesting technology has enabled wireless-powered communications to accommodate wireless data services in a self-sustainable manner. However, wireless-powered communications rely on active RF signals to communicate, and result in high power consumption. On the other hand, ambient backscatter technology that passively reflects existing RF signal sources in the air to communicate has the potential to facilitate an implementation with ultra-low power consumption. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid D2D communication paradigm by integrating ambient backscattering with wireless-powered communications. The hybrid D2D communications are self-sustainable, as no dedicated external power supply is required. However, since the radio signals for energy harvesting and for backscattering come from the ambient, the performance of the hybrid D2D communications depends largely on environment factors, e.g., distribution, spatial density, and transmission load of ambient energy sources. Therefore, we design two mode selection protocols for the hybrid D2D transmitter, allowing a more flexible adaptation to the environment. We then introduce analytical models to characterize the impacts of the considered environment factors on the hybrid D2D communication performance. Together with extensive simulations, our analysis shows that the communication performance benefits from larger repulsion, transmission load and density of ambient energy sources. Further, we investigate how different mode selection mechanisms affect the communication performance.
Index terms-Ambient backscatter, D2D communications, modulated backscatter, repulsion behavior wireless-powered communications. ).Recently, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting [9], [10] has evolved as a promising energy replenishment solution to empower D2D communications with self-sustainability [11]- [14]. Technically, D2D transmitters can harvest energy from RF signals in the air for their operation. By utilizing the harvested energy, the D2D transmitters can communicate without relying on an external energy supply, which will technically and economically facilitate a massive deployment of D2D communication devices. Thus, a zero-energy communication paradigm can be virtually achieved.The recent advance in RF energy harvesting technologies has paved the way for two emerging green communication technologies, namely, wireless-powered communications [9], [15]-[17] and ambient backscatter communications [18], [19].• Wireless-powered communications utilize the harvested energy to generate RF signals for information transmission. The energy harvesting can be performed either opportunistically from ambient RF signal sources (e.g., cellular base stations and mobile terminals) [20] or in a more controlled way from dedicated RF power beacons [24]. A comprehensive survey of wireless-powered communications can be found in [25]. • Ambient backscattering performs data transmission based on modulated backscatter of existing RF signals, e.g., from TV base stations [1...