Approaches for processing packets transmitted within a Passive Optical Network (PON) using executable software. Processing packets within a PON may be performed by classifying one or more packets, of a plurality of received packets, to a particular PON system component, and then processing the one or more packets classified to the same PON system component on a single physical or virtual processor. The one or more packets may be forwarded between a sequence of one or more software stages. The software stages may each be configured to execute on separate logical cores or on a single logical core.