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This paper proposes a novel approach for time synchronization in the IEEE 802.11a communication system. In addition to the conventional use of the 802.11a sequence preamble for synchronization, we exploit the SIGNAL field of the physical packet as a supplementary reference training sequence at the receiver for coarse time synchronization since this field consists of known and predictable parts. Fine time synchronization is then carried out jointly with minimum-mean-squared-error based channel estimation where the true channel is approximated according to a least-squares technique rather than using the power delay profile function. Simulations show that the proposed synchronization method improves the performance measured by the probability of synchronization failure as compared to existing methods.