With the implementation of device-to-device (D2D) communication in primary cellular networks, there will be notable benefits such as increase in cellular capacity, energy efficiency and spectral efficiency. The interference to the cellular user equipment (CUE), due to D2D pairs is reduced with proper strategies on resource allocation and transmit power assignment to the D2D pairs. This leads to healthier sum rate and battery life of D2D pairs. In this paper, we propose a distance-based interference reduction and power management scheme to reduce the interference on CUEs and evolved NodeB (eNB) and thus improve the sum rate of D2D pairs. The power allocation is based on the D2D pairs distance to the CUEs and eNB, which is estimated based on Haversine formula. The transmit power of D2D transmitter is effectively manipulated with respect to the transmit power of CUEs. The system sum rate, total transmit power of D2D pairs and the battery life of D2D user equipment are analyzed and validated through simulation. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.