Hardness of approximation for orthogonal rectangle packing and covering problems

Bansal and Sviridenko [4] proved that there is no asymptotic PTAS for 2-dimensional Orthogonal Bin Packing (without rotations), unless P = NP. We show that similar approximation hardness results hold for several 2and 3-dimensional rectangle packing and covering problems even if rotations by ninety degrees are allowed. Moreover, for some of these problems we provide explicit lower bounds on asymptotic approximation ratio of any polynomial time approximation algorithm. Our hardness results apply to the most studied case of 2-dimensional problems with unit square bins, and for 3-dimensional strip packing and covering problems with a strip of unit square base.