We introduce a variant of the deterministic rendezvous problem for a pair of
heterogeneous agents operating in an undirected graph, which differ in the time
they require to traverse particular edges of the graph. Each agent knows the
complete topology of the graph and the initial positions of both agents. The
agent also knows its own traversal times for all of the edges of the graph, but
is unaware of the corresponding traversal times for the other agent. The goal
of the agents is to meet on an edge or a node of the graph. In this scenario,
we study the time required by the agents to meet, compared to the meeting time
TOPTâ in the offline scenario in which the agents have complete knowledge
about each others speed characteristics. When no additional assumptions are
made, we show that rendezvous in our model can be achieved after time O(nTOPTâ) in a n-node graph, and that such time is essentially in some cases
the best possible. However, we prove that the rendezvous time can be reduced to
Î(TOPTâ) when the agents are allowed to exchange Î(n) bits of
information at the start of the rendezvous process. We then show that under
some natural assumption about the traversal times of edges, the hardness of the
heterogeneous rendezvous problem can be substantially decreased, both in terms
of time required for rendezvous without communication, and the communication
complexity of achieving rendezvous in time Î(TOPTâ)