Renewable energy harvesting (EH) technology is expected to be pervasively utilized in the next generation (5G) mobile networks to support sustainable network developments and operations. However, the renewable energy supply is inherently random and intermittent, which could lead to energy outage, energy overflow, quality of service (QoS) degradation, etc. Accordingly, how to enhance renewable energy sustainability is a critical issue for green networking. To this end, an energy-sustainable traffic steering framework is proposed in this article, where the traffic load is dynamically adjusted to match with energy distributions in both spatial and temporal domains by means of inter-and intra-tier steering, caching and pushing. Case studies are carried out, which demonstrate the proposed framework can reduce on-grid energy demand while satisfying QoS requirements. Research topics and challenges of energy-sustainable traffic steering are also discussed.The next generation (5G) mobile networks are expected to connect trillions of devices and provide 1000-fold network capacity by 2020 compared with that in 2010. Network densification (i.e., deploying more small cell base stations (SBSs)) can effectively improve the network capacity through spectrum reuse, and thus is considered as the key cornerstone for 5G. However, network densification may lead to huge energy consumption, causing heavy burdens to network operators. To tackle the cumbersome energy consumption, energy harvesting (EH) technology can be leveraged. Particularly, energy harvesting enabled base stations (EH-BSs) can exploit renewable energy as supplementary or alternative power sources to reduce the operational expenditures (OPEX). In addition, EH-BSs can be deployed more flexibly without the constraint of power lines. By 2011, over ten thousands EH-BSs have been deployed globally, and this figure will increase to more than 400,000 by 2020 [1].Despite the potential advantages, the inherent randomness of renewable energy poses significant technical challenges to network operations. Specifically, the mismatch between harvested energy and traffic distributions may result in energy outage and/or energy overflow, degrading the quality of service (QoS) and energy utilization. Thus, in addition to energy efficiency, a new performance measure "energy sustainability" should be introduced to keep the energy outage and the energy overflow probabilities as low as possible [2]. To this end, we propose a traffic steering framework to enhance energy sustainability in networks with EH-BSs.Traffic steering goes beyond traffic offloading, which pro-actively adjusts traffic distribution to match with and better utilize network resources, aiming at enhancing network performance or providing better QoS [3]. The proposed framework encompasses three approaches: inter-tier steering, intra-tier steering, content caching and pushing. Specifically, inter-tier steering adjusts the traffic load of each tier according to the variation of renewable energy arrival rate in a large time sca...