Traffic engineering is at the heart of telecommunications engineering. In telecommunication engineering, we have recently experienced a revolution in the form of mobile cellular network generations. History shows a close relationship between the advancements in both telecommunications networks and their corresponding engineering methods. This survey employed qualitative document analysis to chronologically explore the evolution of, and interrelationships between traffic engineering and the mobile cellular networks from 1990s todate. It is evidently a case of the causality dilemma on which of the two influences the other. Nevertheless, we are currently at the right point in time to make giant leaps in both traffic engineering methods and network technology revolution. This study points out the opportunities that the current state of affairs avails to research in these fields.