Self-sustainable communications based on advanced energy harvestingtechnologies have been under rapid development, which facilitate autonomousoperation and energy-efficient transmission. Recently, ambient backscatteringthat leverages existing RF signal resources in the air has been invented toempower data communication among low-power devices. In this paper, we introducehybrid device-to-device (D2D) communications by integrating ambientbackscattering and wireless-powered communications. The hybrid D2Dcommunications are self-sustainable, as no dedicated external power supply isrequired. However, since the radio signals for energy harvesting andbackscattering come from external RF sources, the performance of the hybrid D2Dcommunications needs to be optimized efficiently. As such, we design two modeselection protocols for the hybrid D2D transmitter, allowing a more flexibleadaptation to the environment. We then introduce analytical models tocharacterize the impacts of the considered environment factors, e.g.,distribution, spatial density, and transmission load of the ambienttransmitters, on the hybrid D2D communications performance. Extensivesimulations show that the repulsion factor among the ambient transmitters has anon-trivial impact on the communication performance. Additionally, we revealhow different mode selection protocols affect the performance metrics.
展开▼
