Allocation of bandwidth and storage

We consider two allocation problems in this paper, namely, allocation of bandwidth and storage. In these problems, we face a number of independent requests, respectively, for reservation of bandwidth of a communication channel of fixed capacity and for storage of items into a space of fixed size. In both problems, a request is characterized by: (i) its required period of allocation; (ii) its required bandwidth (item width, respectively); and (iii) the profit of accepting the request. The problem is to decide which requests to accept so as to maximize the total profit. These problems in general are NP-hard. In this paper we provide polynomial-time algorithms for solving various special cases, and develop polynomial-time approximation algorithms for very general NP-hard cases with good performance guarantees.