The recent advanced wireless energy harvesting technology has enabledwireless-powered communications to accommodate wireless data services in aself-sustainable manner. However, wireless-powered communications rely onactive RF signals to communicate, and result in high power consumption. On theother hand, ambient backscatter technology that passively reflects existing RFsignal sources in the air to communicate has the potential to facilitate animplementation with ultra-low power consumption. In this paper, we introduce ahybrid D2D communication paradigm by integrating ambient backscattering withwireless-powered communications. The hybrid D2D communications areself-sustainable, as no dedicated external power supply is required. However,since the radio signals for energy harvesting and for backscattering come fromthe ambient, the performance of the hybrid D2D communications depends largelyon environment factors, e.g., distribution, spatial density, and transmissionload of ambient energy sources. Therefore, we design two mode selectionprotocols for the hybrid D2D transmitter, allowing a more flexible adaptationto the environment. We then introduce analytical models to characterize theimpacts of the considered environment factors on the hybrid D2D communicationperformance. Together with extensive simulations, our analysis shows that thecommunication performance benefits from larger repulsion, transmission load anddensity of ambient energy sources. Further, we investigate how different modeselection mechanisms affect the communication performance.
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