As Rahul's comment indicates, there is no algorithm known to achieve an optimal packing.
However, some effective heuristics have been developed. For example, there is a 2010 paper by
Andrea Cassioli and Marco Locatelli entitled
"A heuristic approach for packing rectangles in convex regions"
(PDF download).
Here is their abstract:
In this paper we propose a heuristic approach for the problem of packing equal rectangles within a convex region. The approach is based on an Iterated Local Search scheme (or, using a terminology employed for continuous problems, a Monotonic Basin Hopping), in which the key step is the perturbation move. Different perturbation moves, both combinatorial and continuous ones, are pro- posed and compared through extensive computational experiments on a set of test instances. The overall results are quite encouraging.
This recent paper has 38 references, so this should give you much to pursue and ponder.