During the last few years, the cross-fertilization between photonics and radio systems has been helping to overcome some major limitations of the classical radio technologies, setting new paradigms, and promising improved performance and new applications with strong benefits for public communications and safety. In particular, photonicsbased wireless systems, albeit still at research level, are moving toward a new generation of multifunctional systems able to manage the wireless communication with several different frequencies and protocols, even simultaneously while also realizing surveillance operations. Photonics matches the new requirements of flexibility for software-defined architectures, thanks to its ultra-wide bandwidths and ease of tunability, and guarantees low footprint and weight, thanks to integrated photonic technologies. Moreover, photonics also allows increased resolution and sensitivity by means of the inherent low phase noise of lasers. In this paper we review, from a technical point of view, the impact that the demonstrated photonics have in wireless systems, and we consider the related spinoffs for other applications relevant to society. We also describe the first demonstrator of photonics-based multifunctional transceiver presented in Nature Journal (Ghelfi, et al., 2014), that sets a breakthrough innovation in the scientific panorama.