With the rapid growth in the deployments of Internet of things (IoT)-based smart devices and innovative real-life applications, there has been unceasing demand to offer the requisite data rates and quality of service. The 5G deployments are expected to fulfill such requirements at the access level. It would also serve the necessities of a wide and specialized range of applications that may need very high data rates or extremely low energy consumption. Furthermore, there would be potentials for the bottlenecks at the core and backhaul networks. Such constraints could be addressed by designing better transport networks at core and backhauls, and photonic networks are the best candidate. This paper presents the study on the integration of 5G and photonics networks, the proposed architectures, challenges, open issues, and silicon photonics’ role in the near future to further enhance the end-to-end performance of the communication networks. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.