This paper studies the distributed freeway ramp metering problem, for which the cell transmission model (CTM) is utilized. Considering the jam density and the upper bounds on the queue lengths and the ramp metering, we first provide feasibility conditions with respect to the external demand to ensure the controllability of the freeway. Assuming that the freeway is controllable, we formulate an optimization problem which tradeoffs the maximum average flow speed and the minimum waiting queue for each cell. Although the cells of the CTM are dynamically coupled, we propose a distributed backward algorithm for the optimization problem and prove that the solution to the problem is a Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, if the optimization problem is simplified to only maximization of the average flow speed, we argue that the obtained explicit distributed controller is globally optimal. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.