In the era of 5G and emerging 6G service-based architectures, research infrastructures require versatile, scalable tools for performance validation. This article presents an original distributed application-layer traffic generation system developed within the PL-5G National Laboratory for Advanced 5G Research. While dedicated hardware generators offer high precision, their prohibitive costs and rigid architectures often limit the scope of distributed experimental research. Shifting the testing paradigm to application-layer microservice interactions, our solution leverages general-purpose computing resources and a containerized microservice architecture to enable realistic, low-cost performance assessment. The primary objective of this study was to analyze the complex relationship between computing resource consumption and traffic generation efficiency. We conducted scalability experiments simulating diverse 5G/6G use cases, such as high-frequency Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data and real-time video streaming. Experimental results demonstrate a near-perfect linear relationship between CPU utilization and throughput for heavy workloads. In contrast, high-frequency packets trigger a critical exception, shifting the bottleneck to severe throughput saturation under intense request rates. The study concludes that the proposed architectural approach provides a flexible, cost-effective alternative to hardware-centric solutions. By identifying these hardware–software dependencies, the system enables efficient, scalable testing without specialized, expensive infrastructure.
Tomaszewska et al. (Mon,) studied this question.