The Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) attribute is an optional attribute that can be added to routes advertised to an EBGP peer to influence the flow of inbound traffic to the AS. The MED attribute carries a 32-bit metric value. A lower metric is better than a higher metric when MED is compared by the BGP decision process. Unless the always-compare-med command is configured MED is compared only if the routes come from the same neighbor AS. By default, if a route is received without a MED attribute it is evaluated by the BGP decision process as though it had a MED containing the value 0, but this can be changed so that a missing MED attribute is handled the same as a MED with the maximum value. SR OS always removes the received MED attribute when advertising the route to an EBGP peer.