Muthu Muthukrishnan of Lucent told me the following problem, which presumably arises in wireless communications. Customers need to request a certain amount of bandwidth (ie. a given range of contiguous frequencies for a given amount of time). For example, a given customer might request 100Mhz from 1-3PM for a video conference call. This 100Mhz may be placed anywhere in the spectrum owned by the communication company. Given that a company has access to a given band of spectrum and a set of customer requests, how should it assign the spectrum to the jobs to satisfy as many of them as possible?