A metric is typically one of many fields in a routing table.
The route will go in the direction of the gateway with the lowest metric.
A router metric is typically based on information such as path length, bandwidth, load, hop count, path cost, delay, maximum transmission unit (MTU), reliability and communications cost.
In Microsoft Windows XP routing it ranges from 1 to 9999.
A router metric is typically based on information like path length, bandwidth, load, hop count, path cost, delay, MTU, reliability and communications cost.