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This paper introduces a new solution to improve the performance for secondary systems in radio frequency (RF) powered cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In a conventional RF-powered CRN, the secondary system works based on the harvest-then-transmit protocol. That is, the secondary transmitter (ST) harvests energy from primary signals and then uses the harvested energy to transmit data to its secondary receiver (SR). However, with this protocol, the performance of the secondary system is much dependent on the amount of harvested energy as well as the primary channel activity, e.g., idle and busy periods. Recently, ambient backscatter communication has been introduced, which enables the ST to transmit data to the SR by backscattering ambient signals. Therefore, it is potential to be adopted in the RF-powered CRN. We investigate the performance of RF-powered CRNs with ambient backscatter …