Techniques for facilitating device-to-device (D2D) communications using a high efficiency distributed channel access scheme are generally described herein. In some examples, a communication zone allocated for wireless D2D communications is divided into resource contention and scheduled transmission portions. The resource contention segment may be used to transmit a request message from a transmitting device to a receiving device (a request-to-send message), and transmit a response to the request message from the receiving device to the transmitting device (a clear-to-send message). The response can indicate a time for the data transmission to occur during the scheduled transmission segment. During the scheduled transmission segment, the scheduled data transmission and other D2D data transmissions among the various devices will be performed. In further examples, contention access techniques may be used during the resource contention segment to manage access to the resource channel.